Sunday, May 17, 2015

Back From The Grave

It's been some months since I left Bloodhunt development. These last 5 months I've been trying to cope with my three indie projects at once (plus my job and life). Multi-tasking has been really difficult, mainly because I love all my games but there's only time for advancing one at a time.

Luckily, I've had time to reflect and I'm determined to resume Bloodhunt development with a much more realistic schedule. First, I've allocated 5 hours per week to the project. At first glance that may seem like not too much, but I think it's a good point to start getting things rolling again. Also, I've divided my time schedule in small chunks of 1 hour which can be invested in design, art, code or marketing (in fact the time I'm using right now to write this post is counting on the marketing slot). This method allows me to time-track my advance in the game at a much smaller scope so I can react faster to risks, demotivation, development roadblocks and what not.

So the good news is Bloodhunt is back in development. The catch is that I'm really determined to finish the game. And this means that I will be systematically reducing the scope of the game from "Bloodlines demake" to "minimal RPG" in order to get things done. I hope you get the idea: first finish Bloodhunt, then iterate on all those fantastic improvements.

And here's the results of the first week of development. I've started redesigning the game to make it smaller, more linear and somehow similar to a demo. Your character starts as a mortal in the Asylum bar. The barman gives you a first quest: go kill an injured lycanthrope in the sewers. You just go there, killing some baddies in the way to the werewolf's lair. Then there's a small boss fight to defeat the lycanthrope. And finally you can retreive the mystic dagger that poisoned the werewolf to the barman of the Asylum. It's a fairly basic quest but it will serve as an introduction to the game. No vampire stuff yet.

In terms of pixelart, I'm reusing all art from the previous prototypes. Here's what I've been toying with these last days. Lots of animating pixels. Hope you enjoy it.